Many agricultural crops lend themselves to a single harvest per season. For instance grain crops, such as corn and wheat, can be harvested all at once. For these crops, mechanical harvesters, such as combines can make a single pass over the ground and harvest the year's crop. Other crops, such as asparagus, do not lend themselves to single pass harvesting. Instead these crops produce better yields when individual fruits or plants are selectively harvested at an appropriate condition for market. After a period of time, another pass can be made over the ground to harvest additional fruits or plants that are now ready for harvest. This process can be repeated until the season's harvest is completed.
For these types of crops, one aspect of profitability for the grower is to selectively harvest the market ready plants or fruits with as little damage as practicable to the remaining fruits or plants. Stated another way, one harvesting criteria is to successfully harvest as many of the market-ready plants as possible. Another harvest criteria is to reduce collateral damage to the remaining immature plants.
Despite many attempts, mechanical selective harvesting of many of these crops, such as asparagus, has remained elusive. This is borne-out in that the vast majority of crops, such as asparagus, continue to be picked manually. Manual picking is very expensive and often exceeds one-half of the value of the crop to the grower. Further, manually harvesting asparagus is grueling work and is generally performed by seasonal workers. Because of the nature of the work, workers often choose other agricultural work instead of asparagus harvesting. As a result, crops risk going unharvested. Accordingly, growers tend to be reluctant about planting acreage in asparagus. In summary, despite great economic incentive and decades of attempts, no viable selective harvesters have been developed. The present inventive concepts address these and other issues.